Book Review for The Book of Lost Hours by Hayley Gelfuso

This story has dual settings and timelines. It begins in pre-World War II Germany and continues into the United States during the Cold War (1930s through 1960s). The author does an excellent job at combining the genres of historical fiction, mystery, adventure, and romance. The story entertains with the subjects of time travel, family secrets, spectral guides, murder, espionage, sexual abuse, and extortion.

The protagonist, Lisavet Levy, begins this story as an eleven-year-old Jewish girl who enjoys listening to her father’s stories. She becomes trapped in a time space library in 1938 and finds herself in a place between the past and the present. She is waiting as instructed for her father to return and insists to those she meets that she is not a timekeeper.

She discovers that people are entering the time space to destroy books so that they reflect their preferred version of events. She becomes obsessed with saving memories and attempts to salvage history by creating her own book of memories from the scraps she is able to salvage. Lisavet’s book of memories becomes a symbol of resistance and others begin to save memories too.

Lisavet is recruited by the CIA and takes on a new identity, assuming her mother’s name, Moira. She is assigned the surname Donnelly by her boss Jack. She plays the role of an Irish Catholic time-space operative with the ability to read minds. She blackmails Jack into making her Director of the Temporal Reconnaissance Program. She uses her position of power to do everything she can to protect those she loves, especially her daughter Amelia. She begins to not only save memories but to also erase memories too. Eventually, she becomes aware that the memories she is erasing are also erasing lives.

Jack Dillinger is a CIA agent who works to recruit Amelia and is known for sleeping with his secretaries. He is promoted to be the head of the CIA. He threatens his time keepers to get them to do what he wants. He has Moira locked up in a psychiatric ward. He manipulates and uses Moria but eventually pays the ultimate price.

Lisavet’s daughter Amelia is born to Lisavet inside a memory, is untethered from time, and can remember things that have been erased. After her father’s disappearance and her mother’s death, she is raised by her Uncle Ernest. After her uncle’s disappearance, she meets Anton—a man her uncle had been helping and a target of the KGB. She questions Anton about Lisavet Levy’s blue book of memories. She wants to see the memories but doesn’t know how to time walk so she asks Anton to go with her. She sees the memory of Elaina, the woman she knows as her mother, with her deceased infant and watches a nurse that looks like Lisavet take a baby into her room.

I loved this story. It was a very thought-provoking book resulting in me asking myself a variety of ethical questions. I enjoyed the idea of a world where a person can exist between time and space—a place where you don’t need to eat, or sleep, and where you don’t age. Also, as a family historian and scrapbooker, I love the idea of a library where memories are stored. I recommend this book to older teens and adults who enjoy this mix of genres. I give this book my 5-star rating!